Guest Blogger

Good day to you!  I am Sarah from Kovescence of the Mind.  

I feel so honored to be a guest blogger on Tales of Teaching with Tech. Sarah and I were  paired up as SLANT partners  a few months back.   Being paired up again allowed us to bypass the introductory part of being a SLANT partner and gave us the chance to dive into something new.  With that being said, we decided to collaborate on a giveaway and guest post for each other's readers.

I am one of the assistant tech directors in my district in addition to teaching high school full time.  I currently teach AP Psychology, AP Literature and Composition, English 11, and Civics.  It keeps me pretty busy, which is why I am always looking for easy and free things to do with my students.

Do you know about Learn 2 Earn?

This is a free website for teachers to manage student reading.  Now you can pay for a subscription, but it has LOTS of basic features in the free version.  Also, if you want to pay and use it as a fundraiser, you, your PTO, or your school can do that to.  I am just going to talk about the the teacher side of things.

The first thing you have to do is create an account.  They give you a demo class, so you can play with the features before putting your own students into the program.  When you input students, you can put parent emails in as well, so they can check on their students.  It also creates a student log in and password, which is what your students use to log in and update their information.  Parents can get a weekly update in their email or log in to check the status of their student's reading.

Once student have their accounts, they can log in, search for the book they are reading, and log their minutes.  This is all done right on the computer with no paper for the teacher to handle.

After a student submits his or her minutes of reading, the program asks them to answer a reading question about the text that they have read.  There is a bank of questions, so students have different option every time.  They can also choose the category, which is a great differentiation technique.

Students earn coins for submitting minutes and answers...who doesn't adore virtual money???

Responses are published to the class, so others can join in the conversation and like what each other has written on the book they are currently reading.  I am infatuated with anything that builds a community of readers.

I, as the teacher, get to see the student responses in my news feed and grade them on the 1-2-3-4 Rubric.  With the paid version, or by referring other teachers and organizations, you can customize and add your own prompts to the response bank.

One of my favorite parts about this site is that it gives me reading data on my class as whole and on student individually.  Now I can talk with the students and parents about the reading the students are doing.

What are you waiting for?  Go create an account NOW at Learn 2 Earn.

Also, in honor of our double SLANT box match, Sarah and I are doing a great giveaway, so be sure to enter today.  Also, swing by my blog Kovescence of the Mind to see Sarah's post.

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